Joseph Kappen

Police soon established that Hughes and Floyd had been seen getting a lift home in a white Austin 1100 on the night of their disappearance.[11] Police followed up numerous lines of enquiry but, as was the case in police investigations at the time, all intelligence and information was collected on large amounts of paperwork, which complicated the inquiry.[6] The Port Talbot steelworks employed 13,000 men, all of whom had to be considered as potential suspects.[11][6] Both the construction of the nearby M4 motorway and the ongoing Neath fair meant hundreds of itinerant workers had to be considered, as well as the countless strangers these events brought into the area.[11] Detectives attempted to trace men who owned an Austin 1100 in the area, but it meant that more than 10,000 drivers had to be visited and questioned.[6][11] The three-day working week imposed by the British government on everyone across the country, as a result of an energy shortage, further reduced the resources of the enquiry and hampered the investigation.[11]

However, one of the men who was investigated as part of enquiries concerning the Austin 1100 was Kappen, who owned that model of vehicle.[6] When police turned up at his home to speak to him, they found his Austin was on blocks with its wheels removed, with Kappen claiming that he could not have committed the murders as his car was not roadworthy.[6] However, in the days after the killings, Kappen's car was logged as being on the road by police carrying out stop and check operations. This would have disproved this claim, but without a computerised system for cross-referencing, this fact was not noticed by detectives at the time.[5] Kappen also claimed to have been at Neath fair on the night of the murders and his wife gave him a false alibi, which she later said was common for her to do when police investigated her husband.[5] Ultimately, therefore, Kappen was not pursued further as a suspect at the time.[5][6] In mid-1974 the investigation was scaled down.[11]

Police hoped that advancements in DNA testing would help solve the murders, and in 1998 there was a significant development when a profile of the killer's DNA was isolated via testing on the clothing of Hughes and Floyd.[11] In 2000 the profile was uploaded to the DNA database to see if it matched any person arrested or charged since 1995 (the year in which DNA started to be taken from people arrested of crimes), although no match was made.[11] However, the developments in DNA led to a full reinvestigation of the murders, titled Operation Magnum.[11] In January 2001 the Llandarcy murders were reconstructed on BBC One's Crimewatch.[12]

Around this time there was media speculation linking serial killer Fred West to the murders as he once worked in Llandarcy, but this was swiftly ruled out by police after the DNA was checked.[12] 35,000 persons of interest were initially identified for DNA testing, but a psychological profiler was employed to reduce the number to a priority list of 500.[11][5] Fifty of these were witnesses, relatives of the victims, stepfathers, boyfriends and anyone who had featured prominently in the initial investigation, and the others were known criminal suspects.[5] Kappen was listed as suspect number 200, and detectives visited what they believed to be his address in Port Talbot in August 2001 but they discovered that he had died of lung cancer in June 1990, although his former wife, who had divorced him in 1980, still lived there.[5]

Two months later, testing on the clothes of Sandra Newton revealed that she had been a victim of the same killer as Hughes and Floyd, meaning that the three murders were officially linked for the first time and revealing that all three had been murdered by the same unidentified individual.[5]

Due to the period of time that had elapsed since the murders, South Wales Police decided to employ a previously unknown tactic of searching for the DNA of possible living descendants of the murderer as their genetic profiles would be similar to the killer's.[5] Fifty per cent of an individual's DNA is inherited from each parent, so investigators believed that they could discover who the killer was by making a partial match between the killer's profile and that of any children they may have had.[5] Investigators therefore examined local individuals' profiles that matched part of the killer's profile and created a list of 100 potential suspects. One of these was local car thief Paul Kappen, whose DNA was already on police files but who was only seven years old at the time of the murders.[5] Paul's profile showed a distinctive similarity to the killer's, prompting police to make his deceased father Joseph, known to have been investigated in the original enquiry, the prime suspect.[5]

The findings of the DNA testing led detectives to apply to Home Secretary David Blunkett to exhume Kappen's body in order to confirm through DNA that he was the murderer, which was granted.[5][6] In 2002 the body was exhumed from Goytre Cemetery on the outskirts of Port Talbot, with it being said by witnesses that a thunderstorm suddenly passed over as the exhumation began and that a large thunderclap was heard when the ground was first dug up, suggesting to them that they had "unearthed evil".[6] Kappen's family consistently denied that he could have been responsible for the murders and claimed he was innocent despite the evidence.[8]

Forensic testing on Kappen's remains subsequently established a perfect match to the murderer's sample, finally proving beyond doubt that Kappen was responsible for the murders.[6] South Wales Police declared the case closed.[6][5] The now-elderly surviving parents of the victims expressed relief that they had finally received a form of closure, with the mother of Hughes stating, "Now we can close the book on that hell forever."[5]

After the findings, Kappen's former wife Christine Powell, who had previously insisted that Kappen was innocent, stated that "our first thoughts are with the families of the victims. Our concerns are protection from hurt for our children. We are all deeply shocked by the revelations."[13]

Murders of Hughes and Floyd

Murder of Sandra Newton

Murder of Maureen Mulcahy

Kappen's home

The locations where Kappen's known victims were found near Port Talbot, and the proximity to Maureen Mulcahy's unsolved murder[18][19][20]

It is not known if Kappen ever killed again after September 1973, but he remains a suspect in the unsolved murder of Maureen Mulcahy, aged 23, in February 1976.[18][8][11] Mulcahy was similarly strangled after a Saturday night out, being found dead the following morning on wasteland very close to the Sandfields estate, where "Saturday Night Strangler" Kappen was living at the time.[18] Witness testimony points to Kappen having abducted her in a manner similar to the 1973 murders.[18] As soon as Kappen had been identified in the 1973 cases, detectives announced their intention to speak to Mulcahy's family.[8]

In Mulcahy's case there was no available DNA evidence in 2002 to examine or potentially link to Kappen and thus police were unable to prove or disprove his involvement.[18] However forensic expert Dr Colin Dark told a BBC programme about the unsolved case in 2020 that there would now be opportunities to look for DNA if the police examined the existing material, pointing out that Kappen had a very rare element of DNA that would allow him to be implicated or eliminated from the case possibly even with only a partial DNA profile from the remaining physical evidence, which the police had still kept.[18] He also observed that police still had tapings from Mulcahy's body and clothing at the time taken to search for fibres, and these could now be examined for DNA if the police chose to.[18]

Police also reexamined the 1973 disappearance of nine-year-old Christine Markham from Scunthorpe,[21] after learning that Kappen had worked as a lorry driver in Scunthorpe and had lived in lodgings in the Humberside area soon after the girl vanished.[21] However serial child abductor and killer Robert Black remains the prime suspect in the Markham case.[22] After he was finally imprisoned in 1994, police announced their suspicions that Black had committed a number of other murders and their intention to investigate him for murders including Markham's.[22]

Kappen is also suspected of having committed numerous other unsolved rapes.[5]